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Comment by Haul4ss | Hacker News Reader

When Apple makes an iPad app to teach kids a programming language useful only in the Apple ecosystem, they're promoting STEM education.

When Microsoft leverages a massively popular game to promote STEM education, they're weaponizing.

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Exactly.

Microsoft has always offered educational versions of Visual Studio at discounted/zero cost. I clearly remember getting a student copy of Visual Basic(VS6.0!) for ~$50.

I built all sorts of stupid things with that and while it definitely biased me in favor of Microsoft tools you know what else it did? Helped me into a rich and diverse career in a wide array of technologies and stacks. Anything that helps bridge that gap is a good thing in my mind.

Problem solving, debugging and abstractions are skills that transcend stacks and can be learned in a wide variety of environments. Engagement is they key to this and I think Minecraft is a great avenue.

It used to be called DreamSpark, and it was awesome when I was in college - particularly since in those days, the Express, single-language free versions of VS hadn't come out quite yet, and the community edition was yet to be a twinkle in someone's eye.

It looks like they give away many Azure services now as well (https://catalog.imagine.microsoft.com/en-us)

I used the equivalent about 15 years ago and you could get windows, office, visual studio and a bunch of other stuff. Good deal.

Especially as you got 10 licences for everything. Was great value.

I believe they stopped it a year or two back.

$50 is expensive for personal software. Many IDEs are free for non commercial use

Yeah but for $50 you can build something that someone might find useful and pay you for it. I wished I had more of an entrepreneur spirit in my college days, it would of paid for all those books that I barely used.

What world we live in that $50 is considered expensive....

I paid around 150 € in for Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.1 with student discount and around 200 € for Turbo C++ 3.1 for Windows 3.1, back in 1993.

Imagine how much that would be in today's money!

Sure, but we're also talking about back in '98 where the software landscape was pretty different. It was about the same as a AAA PC game title which was a fair price to my younger self.

Heck back then I got a physical 8" x 6" box, none of this puny CD/DVD sleeve stuff. We had to drive to a store in downtown San Diego that explicitly sold compilers/productivity software/etc. Hard to believe that happening this day and age.

I had this too, it's what started me going with programming and I use visual studio till this day. It probably laid the foundations for my later job in information security.

HN definitely has this bias and it's not a place to expect reasonable discussion of Microsoft, but if you look at the actual headline of the article instead of the submitted one the use of "weaponize" has more context and makes sense: "Microsoft Weaponizes Minecraft in the War over Classrooms"

I learned to developed a hard skin when discussing such matters on online forums, but back in Portugal in the mid-90's you would hardly find anyone that didn't enjoy using Borland and Microsoft tools as a developer.

The only real alternative to it was doing games and demoscene programming for the Amiga.

I wouldn't say HN has strong anti-MS bias, based on some of discussions that I've seen and participated in here - and I'm a Microsoft employee.

In my experience, flames get to be downvoted pretty quickly, allowing for rational discussion, and providing an opportunity to to be heard, and present rebuttals and counterpoints.

Then again, I also hang out on Slashdot, so my baseline may different from yours...

Yep. And the article doesn't even contain any specific allegations, it is just a clickbait term without meaning.

I'll cheer for anyone (Apple, Microsoft, Google, et al) who promote STEM and come up with novel ways to utilise software in education (including interactive games).

I would prefer everyone to contribute to education out of a kindness rather than wanting money for it. If companies looked towards the future, more might survive. Being known as someone that just wants money or gets money from tax money causes a hostility. Being known as benevolent instead of evil would be a great thing for any company (excluding hidden and niche companies).

IMO both are doing more wrong than good. I ignore the already discussed walled garden Apple is trying to bring to education.

MS is doing the exact same thing. The new Minecraft Education Edition is Windows 10 only. I could live with that. What I find disturbing is that they already killed the orignal MinecraftEdu. Hundreds of teachers are stranded and without support, trying to keep things running.

Worse, MinecraftEdu had modding support. The new Minecraft Education Edition doesn't. Old content won't port over. Instead of embracing the medium, they try to shoehorn classical education principles into the environment.

They had something good, but managed to make it worse. It's sad. I wished there was a free alternative affordable by everyone, irrespective of hardware, OS etc. Alas, it'd require the same mass appeal as Minecraft, which is not going to happen.

Not sure which is worse, Java based MinecraftEdu that wanted manually installing on every computer and kids given write access to the folder, or having to deal with Windows 10 Advertising Edition and Windows Store

When I saw Apple's playground story yesterday, my first reaction was that it would be benchmarked against Minecraft. Perhaps an example of the submarine [1]?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I don't remember the Apple context perfectly, but I think a key difference here is that Microsoft is selling it to educational institutions.

Alright, I had to look it up:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/apple-launches-coding-camp...

But yes, Apple was doing the bootcamps pro-bono. Yeah...I don't really mind the use of "weaponizing" in this context.

If anything, isn't doing something free more potentially sinister, leaving room for an opinion of "weaponizing"?

At least the motive behind selling something is obvious ($$$). The motives behind doing something for free could range from benevolent to evil.

True. But for some reason I look more favorably on Apple for doing something new for free than Microsoft taking an existing platform and monetizing it.

To be clear I support both efforts (to various extents)...just in a fictional ranking context, I (personally) put Apple's bootcamp higher up than Microsoft's Minecraft efforts.

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